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My new book "Libertarian Quandaries" is now available for purchase. In this succinct work I address some common doubts about libertarian theory centered around the claim that it has to balance its excessive moral ambition with the requisite degree of „realism”, „practicality”, and “compromising”. To that extent, I address subjects ranging from the usefulness of ethical principles, to the feasibility of efficient interventionism, to the stability of libertarian anarchy. In other words, the aim of this work is to suggest that the libertarian philosophy is not only theoretically rigorous and practically relevant, but also eminently feasible in strictly pragmatic terms....

If you value brevity of style and clarity of content, I encourage you to have a look at my book "The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty", a collection of over 600 aphorisms grouped into six sets of topics, all related to the overarching topic of liberty and useful in highlighting its various facets in a pithy and pointed manner, available both as an ebook from the Liberty.me Library and as a paperback from Amazon. Liberty is the central element of human nature. It is the essence of will, the source of creativity, and a prerequisite of virtue....

There is a hackneyed anti-business cliché saying that business ethics is a contradiction in terms. In fact, however, it may well be the case that the opposite is true – that business ethics is not so much an oxymoron but a tautology. With its emphasis on profit-maximization, business is often described as amoral at best. After all, the story goes, given their goals, businesspeople are constantly subject to the temptation of trading ethics for money. This, however, is a very naïve vision of business. Business is not just any kind of money-making – it is money-making through voluntary exchange of...

Some claim that NAP (the non-aggression principle) cannot be used as a grounding for the libertarian ethic, since it begs the question in favor of libertarianism by defining aggression in accordance with libertarian preconceptions. This is incorrect. NAP presupposes the notion of aggression that is not libertarian, but commonsensical. Since definitions of everyday concepts can be debated endlessly, the most intellectually respectable thing to do in this context is to follow the Wittgensteinian dictum "meaning is use" and accept their most mundane, everyday definitions (provided that they are sufficiently unambiguous) rather than, say, sophistically conflate them with definitions of related...

When libertarians juxtapose the vices of politics with the virtues of entrepreneurship and recommend substituting entrepreneurship for politics as the most effective method of improving social welfare, they are sometimes accused of demonizing politicians and idealizing entrepreneurs, apparently forgetting that entrepreneurs, too, happen to steal, cheat, eliminate competition through dishonest methods, etc. Such an accusation misses the essence of the libertarian argument. Admittedly, some entrepreneurs happen to engage in all the unsavory activities mentioned above, but those, by definition, are antithetical to the entrepreneurial ethos. In other words, an entrepreneur can fulfill his function perfectly well without engaging in any...

1. Libertarianism does not imply the belief that monopolistic apparatuses of violence known as states are the only enemies of liberty. 2. Libertarianism does not imply the belief that the disappearance of monopolistic apparatuses of violence known as states will automatically result in the emergence of a free society. 3. The scale of statism does not directly imply the degree of its harmfulness. 4. Relative antipathy towards democracy does not imply relative sympathy towards monarchy. 5. Opposing the welfare state does not imply supporting restrictions on immigration. 6. Antipathy towards grumpy conservatism does not imply sympathy for goofy libertinism, nor...

F. A. Hayek famously urged his fellow classical liberals to put their minds to creating “a liberal Utopia, (…) a truly liberal radicalism (…) which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible.” Unlike most, if not all, utopias proposed throughout history, this one, informed by economics and thus cognizant of the ineradicable constraints of scarcity, was supposed to represent not a naively idealistic vision of an earthly paradise, but a pragmatic project of a truly free and prosperous commonwealth. And yet, despite its pragmatic grounding in the science of...

Perhaps one of the most encouraging signs that humankind is steadily moving from a command society to a commercial society is that the prestige of the "public intellectual" is all but gone. There are no Einsteins and Freuds anymore - intellectuals whose names everyone knows and by whose ideas everyone is at least subconsciously influenced. The ones who are nowadays revered for their intellectual accomplishments are not academic theoreticians, but entrepreneurial innovators, such as Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg (or Satoshi Nakamoto in the case of the slightly more initiated). This is a good, intellectually and morally healthy development, an indication...

Is the free enterprise system (otherwise known as laissez-faire, market libertarianism, etc.) amoral or moral? The answer is: it's both, and it's a doubly good thing. On the one hand, it is amoral insofar as one of its primary competitive advantages is its impartial efficiency - due to its inherent institutional features, such as the competitive incentive structure, the intersubjective profit-and-loss-based price system, rapid aggregation of decentralized and tacit information, etc., it is peerlessly effective in promoting all kinds of social values, which may correspond to all kinds of moral and prudential systems. In this sense, the free enterprise system...

A relatively frequent comment that one hears upon familiarizing others with the libertarian philosophy is the following: "This is all based on a psychologically mistaken assumption that people want to be free. Meanwhile, the truth is that the majority of people do not want freedom, but bread, circuses, the appearance of security, the feeling of tribal smugness, etc." This comment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of libertarianism. Libertarianism does not claim that nobody is permitted to voluntarily assume the role of a slave, but that nobody is permitted to impose such a role on others; it...

Critics of libertarianism operate on various intellectual levels. Those whose knowledge of it is very meagre tend to rely on superstitious slogans (“unregulated markets exploit workers”, “price controls are needed to combat speculation”, “who but the state can build the roads?”, etc.) which have been refuted a thousand times in the relevant literature, so they do not require any further comment. Different critical arguments are used by those who have some knowledge on the subject of libertarianism and even sympathize with it, but also believe that they can balance what they regard as its excessive ambition with the requisite degree...